KINDER'S COMMENTARY: FORMER CLINTON ADVISER QUESTIONS HILLARY'S POLITICAL SAVVY

Longtime Clinton Svengali Dick Morris had some tough things to say about likely New York Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Writing recently in National Review, Morris reviewed "The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Joyce Milton, the new biography of the first lady. Morris observes that Milton's book "makes clear that the notion frequently advanced by the Clinton spin machine -- that Mrs. Clinton would have been a successful politician without her extraordinary husband -- is simply fiction."

Mrs. Clinton tried only five cases in her 15-year legal career, and there is no evidence that she received offers from any law firms, big or small, during the year after she graduated from Yale Law School but before she landed in Arkansas, said the former Clinton political adviser in his review.

"The Hillary Rodham of the 1970s was a very different person from the Hillary Clinton of the 1990s. She was not charismatic, she was abrasive. She was not conciliatory, she was dogmatic. Her style, her manner, even her appearance was off-putting -- hardly the attributes of a winning candidate. Her latest attempts to become a popular figure have ranged from unsuccessful to disastrous."

While much of the national media proceeds from the notion that Mrs. Clinton is a shoo-in for the New York Senate seat of retiring giant Daniel Patrick Moynihan, there are plenty of reasons why she could lose. The example of the late Bobby Kennedy, who was raised in Boston and lived most of his adult life in Virginia and the District of Columbia, is cited. RFK moved to New York in the summer of 1964 and won the Senate seat that fall, defeating a New York Republican, Sen. Kenneth Keating. Two cautionary notes apply to this example. The first is that Kennedy faced the voters barely 11 months after the assassination of his brother had bathed his family in sympathy. Still, at a time when Lyndon Johnson was carrying 44 states and winning New York by two million votes in his historic landslide, Kennedy barely squeaked through to victory.

Meanwhile the likely GOP nominee, Big Apple Mayor Rudi Giuliani, hasn't overlooked the use of humor in highlighting the always interesting carpetbagger issue. Mugging for the cameras, Giuliani recently donned an Arkansas Razorback jacket and cap and mused about moving to Arkansas to run for office. Reportedly, Giuliani has a sold-out fund raiser in Little Rock scheduled for later this month.

* * * * *

Wisdom for graduates: FBI director Louis Freeh, addressing the graduates of Marymount University in Virginia, said "core values" such as honesty and integrity must be integrated in everything we do. In fact, the seven-year chief of the FBI said he reminds his new agents that it isn't the results of their cases that are important, but the conduct they display during their investigations.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, meanwhile, told the graduating class of Catholic University that "knowledge is one thing, but virtue is another."

Scalia, who is father to eight children, continued, deploring today's nearly all-pervasive climate of moral relativism, a climate the Clintons have done so much to spread:

"Today, moral formation is no longer an objective subject. It is virtually a forbidden topic. To have views of right and wrong or to be discriminating is the only sin left on campus. May it not happen here."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.